Gender Bias May Make Female Hurricanes Deadlier

Below:

Next story in Science

In both the Bible and magical folklore, power over a man comes
from knowing his true name: Speak it and strike him dead. Names
carry savage clout in everyday life too, as anyone with parents
cruel enough to name them Adolph or Bertha can attest.

Now, a controversial new study suggests gender bias can shape how
people respond to
hurricane names.

A severe hurricane (category 3 and higher) with a feminine name
is more deadly than a storm with a masculine name, behavioral
science researchers from the University of Illinois report today
(June 2) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS). Their statistical model suggests that hurricanes
with female names cause nearly three times more deaths than
hurricanes with masculine names.

"Gender biases and beliefs are very pervasive," said study
co-author Sharon Shavitt, a professor and behavioral psychologist
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "These kind of
biases routinely affect the way we judge people, even when people
explicitly say they don't believe that men and women are
different."

However, independent researchers found several reasons to
question the link between gender stereotypes and hurricane
deaths. Here's why.

The findings are not surprising to scientists who specialize in
the study of names: A deep well of research already shows humans
judge others by names, which convey a wealth of information about
race, class, age and gender. However, people may be unaware of
their underlying prejudices. For example, both male and female
science faculty, who are trained to be objective and aware of
bias, are more likely to offer jobs to male candidates than to
identically qualified women, according to a study published Sept.
24, 2012, in PNAS.

"I think they are absolutely right that names
have stereotypes associated with them, and these stereotypes
are going to unconsciously affect how easy it is for people to
become scared of certain hurricanes," said Cleveland Evans, a
professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska and past president
of the American Name Society. Evans, who was not involved in the
study, said he has written several letters to the National
Weather Service to offer advice on naming hurricanes, to no
avail. [ Sophia's
Secret: Tales of the Most Popular Baby Names ]

Led by graduate student Kiju Jung, the University of Illinois
team studied National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) hurricane names and fatalities for storms that made
landfall in the United States between 1950 and 2012. Ranking the
storm names from very masculine to very feminine, the researchers
discovered the gender effect only came into play for very
damaging storms. (The ranking means they can judge each name on
its own merits, not male versus female.) There was no gender
effect on less-deadly storms, which caused little damage as
defined in the statistical model.

"The rigor of the statistical analysis was very strong," Shavitt
said.

But disaster expert Hugh Gladwin found the results dubious and
misleading. Gladwin pointed out that no simple correlation was
found between the number of deaths and male-female hurricane
names in the study. "The male-female name predictor is not
significant by itself, and only becomes so after a lot of
statistical massaging," said Gladwin, an anthropologist at
Florida International University in Miami, who was not involved
in the study.

And a Live Science analysis found that since 1979,
more male hurricane names have been retired from the official
list than female names. The World Meteorological Organization
retires names of storms that are particularly damaging and
deadly. That means more of the deadliest, costliest storms were
named for men: There are 29 retired male-named storms, compared
with 24 female storms.

The National Weather Service started naming all Atlantic
hurricanes with women's names in 1953. The practice was called
sexist in the 1970s, ended in 1978, and the World Meteorological
Organization now maintains the official roster. There are six
repeating lists, with alternating male and female monikers — one
year "A" is a male name: the next it's a female.

On average, hurricanes killed 47 people each year between 1947
and 2013, and 108 people each year between 2004 and 2013 — a jump
caused by the incredible
number of deaths from Hurricane
Katrina, the National Weather Service reports.

Power of prejudice

After accounting for hurricane deaths, Jung and his co-authors
asked six groups of participants to imagine being in the path of
hurricanes with male or female names. For some groups, the names
were similar, such as Victor and Victoria or Alexander and
Alexandra. Other groups got names drawn from the official 2014
list, including Omar, Cristobal, Dolly and Bertha. The
experimental groups were less likely to evacuate or seek shelter
from feminine-sounding storms, and rated these storms as less
risky and less intense.

In addition to showing possible gender biases, the experiment in
which people were asked to predict hurricane intensity based on
actual hurricane names also revealed Americans' deeply held
racial and cultural biases, Evans said. On a scale from 1
(least intense) to 7 (very strong), this group ranked Bertha at
4.523, or more intense than four other corresponding male names,
except for Omar, at 4.569. Dolly was ranked the lowest.

Since Germany introduced the Big Bertha cannon in World War I,
the name Bertha has been connected with fat, loud and obnoxious
women, Evans told Live Science. And Dolly reminds people of
country signer Dolly Parton, whose friendly reputation colors
perceptions of the name, Evans said. Finally, male names with
racial or ethnic overtones earned the highest-intensity
scores.

Public health researcher Josh Klapow also sees a problem with
extrapolating from focus groups to a real-world disaster setting.

"When you're talking about natural disasters, you can't reproduce
many of the psychological elements in a non-disaster setting. A
controlled experiment is absolutely contrived," said Klapow, a
clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
"There very well may be differences in the way people interpret
names associated with natural disasters, but the whole thing
falls dramatically short of changing policy."

Too soon to change names

The experiments with individual groups show that preconceived
notions about gender may affect
perceptions of risk. But does that mean that hurricanes
should be named for flowers, trees and insects, as Asian
countries do with Pacific typhoons?

Everyone interviewed for this article said no.

Shavitt hopes the results will correct the potential influence of
gender bias by raising awareness. "The power of biases is that
they are so under the radar," she said. "I suggest that when the
media report about hurricanes, meteorologists avoid using
gendered pronouns," Shavitt told Live Science, referring to the
way some meteorologists call the male-named storms "he" and
female-named ones "she."

And even if female-named hurricanes are deadlier than male-named
hurricanes, for practical purposes, names don't matter, Klapow
said. "Deadly is deadly."